Selecting Measures and Dimensions

After you select a chart type, select the measures and dimensions to display in each area of your chart.

When you first create your chart, you are asked to choose a data source or model. The measures and dimensions that you can use are based on the data in that model.

You can add multiple measures and multiple dimensions to your chart. When measures or dimensions are part of a hierarchy, or when a dimension has attributes, you can expand them and select their children, or expand a dimension and select its attributes. You can also apply filters to your measures and dimensions. The chart is updated as you make your choices in the Builder.
Note
When using dimension attributes in your chart, drilling and Display As are not supported. For more information about dimension attributes, see About Preparing Data.
Procedure: Adding Measures and Dimensions to a Chart
  1. Select your chart.
  2. In the Designer, open Builder.
  3. Select measures and dimensions.
Tip

Added a date or time dimension to your chart and want to show some comparisons? Follow the guidelines in Adding Time-Based Variances to Charts.

Options for Measures and Dimensions

You can personalize your charts in many ways including adding color or adding values to tooltips for measures that are not in the chart.

Renaming Measures and Dimensions

There are times when you would rather have a customized description for a measure or dimension in your chart rather than using the default value.

  1. Select your chart.
  2. In the Designer, open Builder.
  3. Pick your measure or dimension and then select Start of the navigation path Next navigation step RenameEnd of the navigation path.
  4. Type a new name for the description.

The new description is displayed in your chart.

To change back to the default information, pick the measure or dimension, select and then select (Reset).

Use Color in Charts

To make your chart more visually appealing, add a Color dimension.

For some chart types, you can use the same dimension for both category and Color feeds. This can be useful if you want to hide the legend for a chart, but still want to see the information that the legend would provide. For example, you can display total sales (measure dimension) by employee (category dimension), and add employee to the color dimension as well.

You can apply the same dimension to both category and color feeds in the following chart types:
  • Bar/Column
  • Box Plot
  • Bubble, Scatterplot, and Cluster Bubble
  • Marimekko

When you switch to a chart type that does not support using the same dimension twice, one of the dimension options will be dropped.

Use Trellis Charts for Comparison

A trellis chart is a set of small charts shown in a grid for comparison. Each small chart represents one item in a section. For example, if you create a bar chart that compares revenue by region, and then add the <Country> dimension to the trellis, multiple small charts appear. Each small chart displays the revenue by region for one country.

  1. Select your chart and then do one of the following:

    • From the action menu () select Start of the navigation pathAdd Next navigation step TrellisEnd of the navigation path.

    • In the Designer, open Builder.

      Find Chart Structure and select Start of the navigation path(Add Chart Components) Next navigation step Add TrellisEnd of the navigation path.

  2. Under Trellis, select Add Dimension and choose your dimension.
Include Extra Measures and Dimensions in Tooltips

You can add information to the tooltip for measures and dimensions that are not in your chart.

You may want to limit the number of measures and dimensions used to create your chart, but still be able to see the details of a datapoint from all the measures and dimensions. Select additional measures and dimensions from Tooltip Measures and Tooltip Dimensions.

  1. Select your chart and then do one of the following:

    • From the action menu () select Start of the navigation pathAdd Next navigation step TooltipEnd of the navigation path, and then select either Measure or Dimension.

    • In the Designer, open Builder.

      Find Chart Structure and select Start of the navigation path(Add Chart Components) Next navigation step Add TooltipEnd of the navigation path, and then select either Measure or Dimension.

  2. Under Tooltip Measures, select Add Measure and choose your measures.
  3. Under Tooltip Dimensions, select Add Dimension and choose your dimensions.

When you move the cursor over a datapoint, the tooltip will show information for all the selected measures and dimensions.

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